Some of us “would never have fallen in love in the first place” if we “hadn’t heard of such a thing” – or so the maxim goes. La Rochefoucauld’s take on romance, here, might sound a touch cynical, but it’s fair to say that the way our heart flutters is governed, at least in part, by the pages we flick.
For generation Xers, the formative love canon has a decidedly ironic edge. More bathos than balconies, young love 80s-style brings to mind Adrian Mole’s proclamations – “Pandora! / I adore ya!” – and Victoria Wood’s exquisite “Crush” on a lad at the bus stop (“If we went for a date I would just be in heaven / I know you’re 16, but I’m tall for 11”).
Recent YA fare takes itself more seriously. From Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses to the eminently functional hook ups in Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, modern takes on first love feel, somehow, less tongue in cheek, less inhibited than they used to be.
But if coming-of-age romances play peek-a-boo with cliche, then this feels less true of first love’s late starters. Take the hero of Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winner Less, for example. Surprising himself, and his narrator, Arthur Less falls in love for the first time, at 44:
He kisses – how do I explain it? … Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.
With a nod to Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “unapologetic love story” Americanah follows first love through a lifetime. Tracking high school sweethearts through three continents and many decades, its opening captures that moment when, “for the first time”, her heroine feels precisely herself, and completely in love:
her skin felt as though it was her right size … The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her. They had known nothing of each other only hours ago, and yet, there had been a knowledge shared between them in those moments before they danced, and now she could think only of all the things she yet wanted to tell him, wanted to do with him.
Such thunderbolts are all well and good, but it’s Americanah’s staging of this couple’s history and connection – “as thick as twine” – that really makes it sing. As their lives, and selves, become heavier, their one-time love becomes a kind of benchmark, a point of rest, and of comparison. For perhaps one of the central lessons that we learn through first love is how to look back on the versions of ourselves.
And if the “firstness” implies that there will be a kind of sequel, it also stands alone. “First love” gives us what George Eliot might refer to as “the make believe of a beginning”, a foundational fiction that we cannot do without. While it rarely leads to happily ever after, it is a sustaining happiness of kinds, a finding of how we are, in that distant echo of the way we were, once upon a time.
